Christian Thompson
Encyclopedia
Christian Andrew William Bumbarra Thompson (born 1978) is a notable Australian born artist. He was born in Gawler, South Australia
. He is a Bidjara man (Indigenous people of central south western Queensland, Australia) and is of British
heritage descending from London
, Margate
and Bampton, Oxfordshire
. His paternal heritage is Aboriginal Australian and his maternal heritage is British of convict and free settler origins. He currently lives and works in Oxford, The United Kingdom. Thompson's Great Great Grandfather is King Billy of Bonny Doon Lorne, who was a senior Tribesman of the Bidjara people and reigned for many years over the district.
Thompson had an itinerant childhood following his Fathers career in the military and lived in Darwin, Wagga Wagga, Raymond Terrace, Toowoomba and Adelaide along with his three brothers Marcus, Matthew and Joel. He spent his formative years and family holidays in Barcaldine and in the bush of the Queensland central desert learning the culture and traditions of his Fathers people from his Grand Mother and Great Aunts. Thompson has stated "Whilst i grew up all over Australia. Home is in western Queensland, where my people are from".
He undertook his Bachelor of Fine Art at the University of Southern Queensland and in 1999 he relocated to Melbourne to undertake his Honors in Fine Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He was an active member of the Melbourne art community exhibiting his own work and curating various acclaimed exhibitions including 'What's Love Got To Do With It', 'White Hot - New Art from Different Places', 'High Tide - Contemporary Indigenous Photography', 'The Bodies That Were Not Ours', 'No Fun Without You', 'A Lot of Love Going Around' and 'If You only Knew'. He has also undertaken a Curatorial Internship at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and was on the curatorial group for shows Contemporary Commonwealth at the National Gallery Of Victoria and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image. He established the MHUL Workshop an annual Workshop for young Indigenous Artists from across Australia and has recently completed a Masters of Theatre at the Dasarts, part of the Amsterdam School of Arts.
. He was the first Aboriginal studio artist at Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces 2006–2007, Melbourne. In 2008 he began international residencies at DasArts Advanced Studies for Performing Arts, Amsterdam and Arizona State University
, Arizona, USA. His work is held in many public and private collections in Australia and overseas including the National Gallery of Australia
, National Gallery of Victoria
,National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, Peter Klein Collection, Eberdingen, Germany, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Australia, Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands, Myer Collection, Melbourne, Australia City of Melbourne Collection, Melbourne, Australia, The Pat Corrigan Collection, Artbank, Cate Blanchett
and Andrew Upton
collection and Private Collections
During his undergraduate degrees Thompson was heavily inspired by Fluxus artists George Maciunas, Yoko Ono and other artists including Rebecca Horn, Christian Boltanski, Eva Hesse, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois. He grew up immersed in music and culture of the eighties and nineties and identified strongly with punk music, growing up on AC/DC and introduced to Sonic Youth and The Beastie Boys at a very young age. He went on to discover the riot girl movement of punk music, connecting to bands like Bikini Kill, Hole, Huggy Bear, Red Aunts, Lunachicks, Bratmobile, Cold Cold Hearts and Babes in Toyland. In his youth frequented alternative music festivals. Thompson meditated on the relationship between form and performance and his early works focused on the relationship to the human form. He later moved into photography and video as a means to capture the performative qualities of his textile based sculptures and elaborate costumes. Thompson states "my formal training is in sculpture and textiles, so i tend to build pictures the way i would make a sculpture, rather than taking photos".
Thompson has been represented by Gabrielle Pizzi
in Melbourne Australia for over 10 years and is represented by Chalk Horse gallery in Sydney. He established himself in 2002 as an up and coming talent in the Australian art world with his first series 'Blaks Palace' a series of photographs and giant oversized sweaters. Thompson' most notable works include his series 'Emotional Striptease', 'The Gates of Tambo' and more recently his series 'Australian Graffiti' which are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia
and the Art Gallery of New South Wales
and AAMU in Utrecht, The Netherlands. His work deals with the nature of identity as an ever evolving and unchartered terrain, bringing together a variety of seemingly disparate forms and themes. His recent series have garnered him international attention and he undertook his first major public art project through the Centre for Future Art Research, The City of Phoenix and Arizona State University
, a permanent garden for the Children's Museum of Phoenix USA.
His recent series of photographs 'Lost Together' was made in The Netherlands where Thompson undertook a residency program at Dasarts developing his live performance work which brings together his Bidjara and European heritage. Combining classical music, traditional rhythms and lyrical narratives into richly textured, lilting and evocative arrangements. His sound based work is concerned with the innate lyricism of his traditional language and the expression of this in contemporary traditional and experimental musical forms. His work has appeared in various national and international publications including, Frieze, Art and Australia, Art Monthly, Realtime, Art Review, Vogue magazine and in Susan Bright's book 'Auto Focus' published by Thames and Hudson. Thompson was also shortlisted and highly commended for the prestigious RAKA Award and in 2011 for the Blake Prize and the Basil Sellers Prize.
In 2010, he was awarded the inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholarship to the University of Oxford
to undertake his Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine Art). and is one of the first two Aboriginal people to attend Oxford University in its 900 year history.
His work was recently included in the 17th International Biennale of Sydney
'The Beauty of Distance - Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age' Curated by David Elliot and the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 'Before and After Science' curated by Sarah Tutton and Charlotte Day. In 2010 he was shortlisted for the Art Gallery of Western Australia Indigenous Art Award along with artists such as Makinti Napanangka, Gulumbu Yunupingu, Judy Watson, Wakartu Cory Surprise and Richard Bell. In 2011 Thompson undertook international residencies at the Australia Council for the Arts Greene street Studio, New York and the Fonderie Darling Studio, Montreal. His work 'Gamu Mambu' from the Sydney Biennale was included in a major exhibition of Korean and Australian art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia and was featured on the cover of the catalogue.
Thompson's video work 'Heat' (2010) will be included in the National Gallery of Australia's National Indigenous Art Triennial in 2011.
http://www.chalkhorse.com.au/artists.php?a=THOMPSON&s=2
Gawler, South Australia
Gawler is the first country town in the state of South Australia, and is named after the second Governor of the colony of South Australia, George Gawler. It is located north of the centre of the state capital, Adelaide, and is close to the major wine producing district of the Barossa Valley...
. He is a Bidjara man (Indigenous people of central south western Queensland, Australia) and is of British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
heritage descending from London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, Margate
Margate
-Demography:As of the 2001 UK census, Margate had a population of 40,386.The ethnicity of the town was 97.1% white, 1.0% mixed race, 0.5% black, 0.8% Asian, 0.6% Chinese or other ethnicity....
and Bampton, Oxfordshire
Bampton, Oxfordshire
Bampton, also called Bampton-in-the-Bush, is a village and civil parish in the Thames Valley about southwest of Witney in Oxfordshire. The parish includes the hamlet of Weald....
. His paternal heritage is Aboriginal Australian and his maternal heritage is British of convict and free settler origins. He currently lives and works in Oxford, The United Kingdom. Thompson's Great Great Grandfather is King Billy of Bonny Doon Lorne, who was a senior Tribesman of the Bidjara people and reigned for many years over the district.
Thompson had an itinerant childhood following his Fathers career in the military and lived in Darwin, Wagga Wagga, Raymond Terrace, Toowoomba and Adelaide along with his three brothers Marcus, Matthew and Joel. He spent his formative years and family holidays in Barcaldine and in the bush of the Queensland central desert learning the culture and traditions of his Fathers people from his Grand Mother and Great Aunts. Thompson has stated "Whilst i grew up all over Australia. Home is in western Queensland, where my people are from".
He undertook his Bachelor of Fine Art at the University of Southern Queensland and in 1999 he relocated to Melbourne to undertake his Honors in Fine Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He was an active member of the Melbourne art community exhibiting his own work and curating various acclaimed exhibitions including 'What's Love Got To Do With It', 'White Hot - New Art from Different Places', 'High Tide - Contemporary Indigenous Photography', 'The Bodies That Were Not Ours', 'No Fun Without You', 'A Lot of Love Going Around' and 'If You only Knew'. He has also undertaken a Curatorial Internship at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and was on the curatorial group for shows Contemporary Commonwealth at the National Gallery Of Victoria and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image. He established the MHUL Workshop an annual Workshop for young Indigenous Artists from across Australia and has recently completed a Masters of Theatre at the Dasarts, part of the Amsterdam School of Arts.
Work
He has presented his photographs, videos and performance work in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. He undertook an Honours degree in Visual Art in 1999 and a Masters of Fine Art from 2004 to 2005 at RMITRMIT University
RMIT University is an Australian public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. It has two branches, referred to as RMIT University in Australia and RMIT International University in Vietnam....
. He was the first Aboriginal studio artist at Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces 2006–2007, Melbourne. In 2008 he began international residencies at DasArts Advanced Studies for Performing Arts, Amsterdam and Arizona State University
Arizona State University
Arizona State University is a public research university located in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area of the State of Arizona...
, Arizona, USA. His work is held in many public and private collections in Australia and overseas including the National Gallery of Australia
National Gallery of Australia
The National Gallery of Australia is the national art gallery of Australia, holding more than 120,000 works of art. It was established in 1967 by the Australian government as a national public art gallery.- Establishment :...
, National Gallery of Victoria
National Gallery of Victoria
The National Gallery of Victoria is an art gallery and museum in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is the oldest and the largest public art gallery in Australia. Since December 2003, NGV has operated across two sites...
,National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, Peter Klein Collection, Eberdingen, Germany, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Australia, Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands, Myer Collection, Melbourne, Australia City of Melbourne Collection, Melbourne, Australia, The Pat Corrigan Collection, Artbank, Cate Blanchett
Cate Blanchett
Catherine Élise "Cate" Blanchett is an Australian actress. She came to international attention for her role as Elizabeth I of England in the 1998 biopic film Elizabeth, for which she won British Academy of Film and Television Arts and Golden Globe Awards, and earned her first Academy Award...
and Andrew Upton
Andrew Upton
Andrew Upton is an Australian playwright, screenwriter, and director. He is the husband of the actress Cate Blanchett.-Career:As a playwright, Upton created adaptations of Hedda Gabler, The Cherry Orchard, Cyrano de Bergerac, Don Juan and Uncle Vanya for the Sydney Theatre Company and Maxim...
collection and Private Collections
During his undergraduate degrees Thompson was heavily inspired by Fluxus artists George Maciunas, Yoko Ono and other artists including Rebecca Horn, Christian Boltanski, Eva Hesse, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois. He grew up immersed in music and culture of the eighties and nineties and identified strongly with punk music, growing up on AC/DC and introduced to Sonic Youth and The Beastie Boys at a very young age. He went on to discover the riot girl movement of punk music, connecting to bands like Bikini Kill, Hole, Huggy Bear, Red Aunts, Lunachicks, Bratmobile, Cold Cold Hearts and Babes in Toyland. In his youth frequented alternative music festivals. Thompson meditated on the relationship between form and performance and his early works focused on the relationship to the human form. He later moved into photography and video as a means to capture the performative qualities of his textile based sculptures and elaborate costumes. Thompson states "my formal training is in sculpture and textiles, so i tend to build pictures the way i would make a sculpture, rather than taking photos".
Thompson has been represented by Gabrielle Pizzi
Gabrielle Pizzi
Gabrielle Pizzi was an Australian art dealer who promoted Aboriginal art from the Western Desert from the early 1980s.-Early life:Born Gabrielle Wren, in Sydney she moved to Hobart when she was five years old...
in Melbourne Australia for over 10 years and is represented by Chalk Horse gallery in Sydney. He established himself in 2002 as an up and coming talent in the Australian art world with his first series 'Blaks Palace' a series of photographs and giant oversized sweaters. Thompson' most notable works include his series 'Emotional Striptease', 'The Gates of Tambo' and more recently his series 'Australian Graffiti' which are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia
National Gallery of Australia
The National Gallery of Australia is the national art gallery of Australia, holding more than 120,000 works of art. It was established in 1967 by the Australian government as a national public art gallery.- Establishment :...
and the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery of New South Wales
The Art Gallery of New South Wales , located in The Domain in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, was established in 1897 and is the most important public gallery in Sydney and the fourth largest in Australia...
and AAMU in Utrecht, The Netherlands. His work deals with the nature of identity as an ever evolving and unchartered terrain, bringing together a variety of seemingly disparate forms and themes. His recent series have garnered him international attention and he undertook his first major public art project through the Centre for Future Art Research, The City of Phoenix and Arizona State University
Arizona State University
Arizona State University is a public research university located in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area of the State of Arizona...
, a permanent garden for the Children's Museum of Phoenix USA.
His recent series of photographs 'Lost Together' was made in The Netherlands where Thompson undertook a residency program at Dasarts developing his live performance work which brings together his Bidjara and European heritage. Combining classical music, traditional rhythms and lyrical narratives into richly textured, lilting and evocative arrangements. His sound based work is concerned with the innate lyricism of his traditional language and the expression of this in contemporary traditional and experimental musical forms. His work has appeared in various national and international publications including, Frieze, Art and Australia, Art Monthly, Realtime, Art Review, Vogue magazine and in Susan Bright's book 'Auto Focus' published by Thames and Hudson. Thompson was also shortlisted and highly commended for the prestigious RAKA Award and in 2011 for the Blake Prize and the Basil Sellers Prize.
In 2010, he was awarded the inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholarship to the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
to undertake his Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine Art). and is one of the first two Aboriginal people to attend Oxford University in its 900 year history.
His work was recently included in the 17th International Biennale of Sydney
Biennale of Sydney
The Biennale of Sydney is an international festival of contemporary art, held every two years in Sydney, Australia. It is the largest and best-attended contemporary visual arts event in the country...
'The Beauty of Distance - Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age' Curated by David Elliot and the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 'Before and After Science' curated by Sarah Tutton and Charlotte Day. In 2010 he was shortlisted for the Art Gallery of Western Australia Indigenous Art Award along with artists such as Makinti Napanangka, Gulumbu Yunupingu, Judy Watson, Wakartu Cory Surprise and Richard Bell. In 2011 Thompson undertook international residencies at the Australia Council for the Arts Greene street Studio, New York and the Fonderie Darling Studio, Montreal. His work 'Gamu Mambu' from the Sydney Biennale was included in a major exhibition of Korean and Australian art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia and was featured on the cover of the catalogue.
Thompson's video work 'Heat' (2010) will be included in the National Gallery of Australia's National Indigenous Art Triennial in 2011.
External links
- Official Site
- National Gallery of Australia
- http://www.bos2008.com/app/biennale/artist/9
http://www.chalkhorse.com.au/artists.php?a=THOMPSON&s=2